Pundits often describe deep learning as an imitation of the human brain. But it’s really just simple math executed on an enormous scale. Good summary of how much human engineering goes into current ML systems.

The titan of consumer technology has a conundrum: Can it create consumer delight in technology without snooping on its customers? Last week Apple presented BNNS, its neural network framework to run (not train) models on the phone, and SiriKit, a developer interface for Siri.

Google DeepMind released published several papers, mostly on Reinforcement Learning. Instead of listing them here, check out their publication page. Some of the most recent papers aren’t posted yet, so keep checking.

To compare using KBs, information extraction or Wikipedia documents directly in a single framework the authors construct an analysis tool, MovieQA, a QA dataset in the domain of movies. The method closes the gap between all three settings and achieves state-of-the-art results on the existing WikiQA benchmark. By Alexander Miller, Adam Fisch, Jesse Dodge, Amir-Hossein Karimi, Antoine Bordes, Jason Weston (Facebook).

A novel end-to-end method for automatically generating short email responses, called Smart Reply. It generates semantically diverse suggestions that can be used as complete email responses with just one tap on mobile (Google).